Former Twitter employee was offered ‘truck full of money’ to build this ’unethical thing’
- A former employee Steve Krenzel has come up with a shocking revelation of the micro-blogging platform during 2015-16
A barrage of changes have taken place in the one week that Tesla CEO Elon Musk took charge of the micro-blogging platform Twitter. From massive layoffs that saw entire departments get dissolves to ‘please return mails’ to sacked tweeps citing erroneous judgement.
While all this took over the weekly newsletter from Twitter, a former employee Steve Krenzel has come up with a shocking revelation with the biggest concern of today- Data and privacy.
Steve talks about the 2015-16 period when Twitter was ‘on the brink of death’ and he was asked to ‘build the most unethical thing’.
Steve took to Twitter on Tuesday to say, “With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter”
2015-16 Twitter : Background
According to the narrative posted in a thread of tweets by Krenzel, during this period Dick Costolo had been ousted and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had taken over as the part-time CEO.
Krenzel further states that Twitter at this time was on the brink of death. The US Presidential Election in 2-16 put Twitter back on the map, according to Krenzel. The 2016 US Presidential elections saw Republican Donald Trump become the 45th President of US.
The (unethical) demand
Krenzel was part for the team that looked after making Twitter a better place for emerging markets like Brazil, India. This included reducing bandwidth, memory usage, battery consumption and app size. Once successful, Krenzel was termed the ‘mobile logs guy’ and ‘pulled into a sales conversation’.
According to Krenzel's narrative, a telecom company was ready to pay the cash starved Twitter a hefty sum to ‘log signal strength data in N. America and send it to them.’ Krenzel further says that his solution wasnt liked by the Telecom company and after much back and forth, he was asked to provide “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” Krenzel quotes.
This comes after the telecom company had earlier asked to know how many of their users are entering their competitors’ stores.
Dump truck full of US Dollars !
In a sub-narrative, Krenzel mentions that he had encountered a manager during this conversation who had offered him a dump truck full of money to stay back
“In the middle of this, I had gotten a new manager who, in a retention attempt I’ll never forget, said “If we filled a dump truck with money and dumped it on you, would you stay and build this?””, he says.
The story after
Krenzel says to the ‘unethical’ demand from the director of the Telecom company, he somewhat said an alternative of “No fucking way”. Notably, Krenzel mentions “legal said the request was fine – none of it violated the user ToS”.
He goes on to say that Twitter had just got out of a huge layoff and mass exodus and did not bother to touch Krenzel's team of engineers following the incident. “I had done what I could, but Twitter was no longer a place to do good work. I decided to join the exodus and would pull any levers to kill this on my way out.”, he said.
He let Jack Dorsey know about it via an email tow hich Dprsey had replied, "“Let me look into that and make sure there isn’t a misunderstanding. It doesn’t seem right. We wouldn’t want to do that”. Steve tells his readers that the project was canned after all.
Krenzel on Elon Musk Twitter
Citing the recent scenario at the Twitter Headquarters and the global workforce, Krenzel said, “I don’t know if this mindset will hold true with the new owner of Twitter though. I would assume Elon will do far worse things with the data.”
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Business NewsNewsWorldFormer Twitter employee was offered ‘truck full of money’ to build this ’unethical thing’
First Published:8 Nov 2022, 03:05 PM IST
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